Innovation comes from those who are happy to embark on a course of action without quite knowing where it will lead, without doing a feasibility study, without fear of failure or too much hope of reward. The engine of innovation is reckless generosity"

I couldn't quite pick a single line to quote, but I think I'll choose this. I've been listening to a lot of FCB this weekend, and it's all rung true for me. But especially: the value of serendipity on culture, of one thing informing another months or years later, of the value of pleasure and the imagination to all walks of life. So much here.

'Together with Caper I have also been working on a small art project for the RSC. We’ve been interested in working with the building itself… We wanted to explore the building as a whole, the total sum of effort and action that makes experiencing the performance possible; some of it behind the scenes. To do that, we wanted to put together an app that would analyse, visualise and display activity in the building as it happens." Lovely stuff from Natalia; this is another piece of work commissioned at the same time as the piece I'm doing for the RSC (more of which anon).

"The fascinating thing about the New Aesthetic could be that it was never new — it went from being unknown to being ubiquitous and thoroughly banal with barely a blink. The frisson of shock or wonder one experienced at seeing an aspect of the New Aesthetic out in the wild comes because that is the only time it will be noticed; afterwards it will pass unobserved. The New Aesthetic is not about seeing something new — it is about the new things we are not seeing. It is an effort to truly observe and note emergent digital visual phenomena before they become invisible." This is a really solid, careful piece from Will Wiles.

22 August 2011

The following is an essay for the newspaper distributed to participants of Edgelands, a one-day ‘flash conference’ on technology and the arts, held in Edinburgh on 21st August 2011.

Hannah asked me to write something about technology for the arts sector, and I chose a slightly different take on the notion of ‘Technology as a Material’. I’ve written about material exploration of data before. This piece was intended as a broader, more high-level exploration of the topic for creators in the arts.

Much of the thinking in here – although shaped by my own experiences – began during my time at Berg, and I specifically wanted to thank my former colleagues for their many investigations into “Immaterials” and their undeniable influence on this train of thought.

To make art with technology, one does not use it as a tool; one must understand it as a material. Technology is not always a tool, an engineering substrate; it can be something to mould, to shape, to sculpt with.

Materials have desires, affordances, and textures; they have grains. We can work with that grain, understanding what the material wishes to be, wishes to do – or we can deliberately choose to work against it. We must understand that grain and make a deliberate choice.

Software is a material. A language like Processing is better at some tasks than others, faster at some things than others, easier to manipulate in certain directions and harder in others. It has a grain, and desires, that we must understand to work with it – that we learn through working with it.

A service like Twitter has an inherent pace, a vernacular language, limitations on its functionality. A project built with it needs to work within these givens to be suited to the medium.

Data is a material. To work with streams of live information, or data sources from an API, it to understand the fidelity of that information, the frequency of update, the relations to other data it affords or not. To work with it requires exploring the dataset, honing your demands of it to those it can meet.

Hardware is a material. As Anthony Dunne writes in Hertzian Tales: “All electronic products are hybrids of radiation and matter“. To build with electronics is to understand both that radiation and that matter. How fragile is the hardware? How can it be housed? Is the output from sensors like cameras or microphones accurate enough? And in the case of radio-based hardware, be it GPS, 3G, Bluetooth or RFID – what affects the field of that radio? Is it useful to the fidelity you require? Is it an appropriate solution for the installation? How does it even work?

In “Immaterials: The Ghost in the Field”, Timo Arnall, Jack Schulze and Einar Sneve Martinussen explore the spatial qualities of RFID through long-exposure photography and an LED probe. The end result is an actual understanding of the field of an RFID reader, not read on a datasheet, but gleaned through experimentation and exploration – all to better understand RFID as a material in its own right.

We understand materials not by reading about them, or assuming what they can do, but by exploring them, playing with them, sketching with them. Ideally, that sketching happens in the final material, but perhaps, like a sculptor sketching on paper, it happens in abstractions such as paper-prototyping. What matters is that you find a way. Sketching is not just about building towards a final work; it’s about building familiarity with a medium itself, working it into one’s practice.

As creators, we must feel our materials – even if we are not the ones using them in the end.

The sculpture analogy is again useful. For centuries, sculptors have worked with the aid of others in their studios and workshops, to produce large works. But despite drawing on the expertise of others, they must be skilled in their chosen mediums themselves.

Last year, I went to see an exhibition of sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s notebooks. In amongst the sketches and prototypes, there was a piece of circular graph paper with a line traced on it. This was part of the process of Monument, Whiteread’s resin, mirrored cast of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar square. It was a print-out from a machine used to test the resin Whiteread was using to cast the sculpture. There, inside her notebook, she had kept a proof of the material’s capacities: a commitment to understanding the material she’d be working with. If technology is a material, artists should treat it no differently.

A better understanding of materials leads to better usage of them. Poor execution cannot be written off with the excuse “oh, but it’s art“; the vernacular understanding of technology is now too sophisticated for that. To embrace an audience’s existing understanding of technology, we must meet their expectations: not being ugly, not being broken. Audiences expect polish, even in experimental work. And to understand that execution, we must become literate in our materials.

Alan Kay defined literacy as “the ability to both read and write in a medium“. I would agree – but I must also be honest: the barrier to becoming literate with technology is perhaps higher than for those materials you can feel in your bare hands.

It’s still lower than it ever has been, though. Compare the diversity and quality of tools aimed at the non-specialist, the designer, the creative to what was availably twenty, thirty years ago. It’s not just that technology has advanced: our abstractions have too. Thanks to prototyping and creative tools such as Max/MSP, OpenFrameworks, or Arduino, it is easier than ever to explore the creative applications of technology.

And, as throughout the arts, there is always value in collaboration. To make art with technology is to make art with technologists, and there are a great many people out there – if you look for them – sensitive to creative endeavours, skilled in technology, and eager to collaborate.

It’s imperative to work with technologists through the creative process: they are not just manufacturers, but collaborators. As a technologist, it’s important for me to observe the terrain I’m working in, to sit with others and see them at work, for them to see what my process looks like. It’s how we come to a shared understanding of one another, and of the work itself.

Technology is not something to be used cynically, to qualify for funding, or to add a veneer of supposed “innovation” to tired work. For art is a purpose, not an excuse. To make art with technology is to make art out of technology. Artists should consider it as a material like any other.

"…in honor of Canabalt's first birthday (back on September 1st), why not write a guided tour of how everything works instead?" Lots of good tidbits on here; the stuff on hitboxes is particularly well observed and explained.

"We’ve just launched a project in collaboration with biochemist/photographer, Linden Gledhill for Canon’s PIXMA colour printer range. The project features surreal ‘sound sculptures’ made of dancing droplets of paint captured in extreme detail as they react to sound waves." Just beautiful.

30 September 2010

I don’t think we’ll ever notice the age of cyborgs, because we do these things one at a time. We roll them out in small ways, and increment them across society. We quietly piece together a know-everything machine, make its connections invisible, then put it in a small box we built as a talk-to-anyone-machine, and carry it around with us. (The first and ultimate prosthetic of the species being community, and so our most powerful magics will always be incantations to one another.) We hand out drugs to everyone that make them more ready for capitalism as a warm, tasty beverage. While we talk about powersuits and armies of robots, we get into metal boxes next to explosion chambers and extend our proprioception to their edges. We do this so that we can then hurtle down ribbons of death we’ve built all around the landscape at speeds not naturally found very often this side of celestial interaction. We call this commuting and consider it one of the most boring things humans do.

"…you can’t help but wonder if there was some genius in the aggregate. Like Gerhard Richter’s “Atlas”, perhaps Winogrand’s greatest work wasn’t in the brilliant moments or creative editing, but in the Complete Everything, in the performative act of making hundreds of thousands of images, of the people, with the people?" Michael David Murphy on Gary Winogrand, and the value of his work perhaps being in the entirety of it.

"He calls the new version of the escapement a 'Chronophage' (time-eater) – "a fearsome beast which drives the clock, literally "eating away time". It is the largest Grasshopper escapement of any clock in the world." Stunning new timepiece for the Corpus library. Breathtakingly beautiful.

"This is something I said about Spore a while back, actually. I thought Spore could be a little like what Understanding Comics is to Comics. As in something from the form which uses the form to explain the form." Oh, I like that as an idea. He can be a smart one at times, that Gillen.

"I've just finished attending the AIR tour and during the final (particularly funny) presentation, I completed a TextMate plugin that has full API completion support." Useful – some syntax completion, and a shortcut for application preview.

"You might argue that an iPhone without connectivity is, well, an iPod, but its not. To state the (obviously overlooked) obvious – it is a phone without connectivity and that over time the ease and evolving practice of disconnecting fundamentally changes our assumptions of what we can expect from a phone, which in turn alters our expectations about the connectivity of other people." Jan Chipchase on pause buttons and understandings of what "social" means. Excellent.